Theft (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
A Novel
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4.4 • 23 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a Washington Post Top 10 Fiction Book of 2025
In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize, a master storyteller captures a time of dizzying global change.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Abdulrazak Gurnah delivers a gripping story of friendship, class, and betrayal among three young people in Tanzania in his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despite his largely absent mother, Karim has become a responsible young man. Badar, a distant relative, is bitterly resentful of his parents, having been sent to live with Karim’s mother and stepfather as a servant. And Fauzia, Karim’s friend, is hoping to escape her smothering relationship with her mother. The complex forces motivating each member of this trio seem to zip around the page as Karim and Fauzia get married and take Badar into their home after he’s falsely accused of stealing. But you can feel how tenuous this hopeful new arrangement really is. Gurnah is a compelling storyteller whose prose reveals more than what’s visible on the surface. This is a story not just of human frailty but also a culture in crisis. It’s a thoughtful, entertaining read from a master novelist.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two Tanzanian men, abandoned as boys, forge their own paths in this incisive novel by Nobel Prize winner Gurnah (Afterlives). Karim's Muslim parents divorce when he is a boy. His mother, Raya, feels no affection for him, and abandons him to her father after falling in love with a man named Haji Othman. Years later, Badar, a 10-year-old orphan boy, enters the Othman household as a domestic servant for Raya, who's now married to Haji. As the novel unfolds, Badar is revealed to be Haji's nephew, cast off by his wayward brother and hated by Baba, the household's elderly and devout patriarch. Karim becomes aware of Badar's plight during a visit home from university, when Badar is 15. Two years later, when Baba suspects Badar of stealing groceries on the family's credit, he instructs Haji to banish the teenager. Badar goes to live with Karim, now a married low-level bureaucrat in Zanzibar, and both men rise through the ranks of their respective fields, with Badar's hotel busboy job leading to an assistant manager position and Karim on track to become a government minister. By the novel's end, their series of cosmopolitan encounters have driven one to abandon his Tanzanian identity and the other to reinvest in it. Written in lucid prose, Gurnah's tale is at once culturally specific and emotionally universal, especially in depicting Badar's heartache as a boy and the strangeness of his arrangement with the Othman household as seen from Karim's point of view. Gurnah is at the top of his game.
